Citizen Perspectives on Accountability in Developing Democracies

In many developing democracies around the world, accountability is low. Politicians are not held accountable either individually for their behaviour or collectively for their parties’ policies. Corrupt or under-performing politicians are voted back into office and investment into essential public goods such as infrastructure, healthcare and education is often inefficiently allocated. This is partly a supply-side problem that is linked to institutional design and the parties and politicians themselves. At the same time, citizens play a crucial role in holding politicians accountable. Their ability and willingness to do so is essential for the functioning of democracy and crucial for a fair distribution of resources (see discussion in Lindberg et al. 2017). For the last decades, most of the research studying accountability problems in developing democracies has had a macro level orientation, focussed on variations in institutions and the ability of governments to manipulate elections either massively or more subtly (this is too vast a literature to cite but its bases were laid with the work of Schedler (2002) and Diamond (2002). Thus, most academic attention has been directed toward the lack institutional safeguards and robust opposition groups to challenger power-holders in developing democracies. To the extent that the role of citizens for accountability in developing democracies was considered, the focus was on their lack of education and skills to engage productively with representative democracy, following a modernization theory style argument (Lipset 1959). However, even in imperfect democracies, citizens can exert some control over politicians and political decisions and, in principle, can punish incumbents for improper behaviour and bad performance. Departing from the focus on the supply side of accountability, a vibrant literature has emerged over the past years that seeks to understand what can be termed a “citizen perspective” on accountability in developing democracies. Although dispersed across different substantive literatures, this work is united by its direct focus on citizen attitudes, political preferences, and trade-offs when making electoral choices. Its shared perspective is that citizens in developing democracies are not simply passive victims of office holders’ resistance to accountability but make active choices even if that choice is to overlook corruption or to engage in clientelism. The work on the citizen’s perspective of accountability is currently dispersed in three strands of literature that this workshop seeks to bring together. The first is the literature on attitudes towards corruption. Corruption is obviously a central theme in accounts of accountability problems in developing countries. Research on determinants of corruption has also long been dominated by a focus on institutions and bribe-takers. More recently, however, scholars have become more aware that the focus on the supply side obscures the fact that corruption cannot persist without bribe-givers (Tatarko and Mironova 2016). A central concern of this newer literature is to understand why there is no direct link between the high level of resentment of citizens feel toward corruption and citizen action against it. Indeed, corruption regularly features as one of the most important problems and concerns in surveys of citizens in developing countries (see, for instance, the last rounds of the Barometer survey series in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa). However, there is no consistent evidence that such concerns also lead citizens to punish corrupt politicians. While many studies find that citizens punish corrupt politicians when confronted with hypothetical corruption scenarios (e.g (Winters and Weitz-Shapiro 2013) other studies have shown that this is not borne out when real politicians and behavioural outcomes are used (see review and findings in Boas et al. (2018)). The conclusion is that social norms against corruption appear to be strong, but not salient enough to generate pro-accountability behaviour. One of the directions corruption research has taken to understand this missing link between norms and behaviour is to consider the psychological impact of knowledge about corruption. This has produced some evidence that information about corruption generates “resignation” towards the formal democratic process and decreases beliefs of efficacy (Bauhr and Grimes 2014; Dahlberg and Solevid 2016; Agerberg 2018; Carreras and Vera 2018; Olsson 2014). A second strand of the literature that addresses accountability problems is the literature on political clientelism. Clientelism is another key factor in discussions of accountability problems as the exchange of political support for particularistic goods directly challenges accountability in the formal democratic process (Stokes 2007, 2005; Kitschelt 2000). Similar to the literature on corruption, most work on clientelism has focussed on the supply side thus far, in particular on party/ candidate strategies and brokers (e.g. Vicente 2014; Wantchekon 2003; Stokes et al. 2013; Gans-Morse, Mazzuca, and Nichter 2013; Nichter 2014; Szwarcberg 2012; Pellicer and Wegner 2013) . Voters, in tun, where mostly considered as willing vote sellers but rarely studied (for a critique of this literature, see Pellicer et al. (2019)). Akin to the literature on corruption, strong arguments have been made in recent years for the need to understand the role of citizens and clients in sustaining the clientelism. As in corruption, a clientelistic exchange requires not only an offer but also someone willing to accept it (Nichter 2018; Pellicer et al. 2017). Thus, recent research has started to unpack the evaluations that citizens make of clientelistic offers and exchanges (Gonzalez Ocantos, de Jonge, and Nickerson 2014; Kramon 2017; Mares and Young forthcoming; Pellicer et al. 2019; Pellicer and Wegner 2018a; Wegner et al. 2019). Some of this new research also suggests that psychological factors, such as beliefs about efficacy and the need for dignity matter for the decision to engage in clientelism (Pellicer and Wegner 2018b; Pellicer et al. 2017). In addition, research on the citizen perspective on clientelism has shown that clients might actively seek the best offers of vote-buying, engage in insurance style long-term clientelist relations, or attempt to select the most efficient broker (Muñoz 2014; Nichter and Peress 2017; Auerbach and Thachil 2018). In other words, citizens attempt to get something out of politics and try to enforce some accountability, but these attempts are geared towards informal politics instead of the formal political process. Lastly, there is a new strand of literature that engages directly with citizen constraints and behaviour toward accountability in the formal political process in developing countries. Most of this research is inspired by the “information hypothesis”, namely, that it is lack of information on politicians’ quality, efforts and performance as well as on voters’ rights and responsibilities in a democracy that prevents citizens from holding politicians accountable (for a review of “early” work on this topic, see Pande (2011)). Work evaluating the response of citizens to a variety of information about political rights and politician performance in countries as diverse as Uganda (Grossman and Michelitch 2018; Humphreys and Weinstein 2012), Benin (Adida et al. 2017) Brazil (Boas, Hidalgo, and Melo 2018), Mexico (Arias et al. forthcoming, 2019), Mali (Gottlieb 2016), or India (Goyal and Hardin 2018) has flourished in the past years. Results are mixed, at best. While earlier studies painted a generally optimistic picture (Pande 2011), a recent meta-analysis has shown that, overall, citizens do not react when provided with information on incumbent performance (Dunning et al. 2019). The puzzling result that knowledge of incumbent performance does not increase citizens’ efforts to hold politicians accountable is currently inspiring a new generation of projects on this topic. These three strands of literature on citizens’ perspectives on accountability share the assumption that the citizens’ choices, preferences and trade-offs matter as much as political institutions or the choices of politicians for sustaining a lack of accountability in low- and middle-income countries. However, although they all study mechanisms preventing citizens in developing democracies from demanding more accountability, they have not yet truly capitalized on the insights brought in by the other strands. Our workshop on citizen perspectives on accountability in low- and middle-income countries aims to bring together work from these three strands of literature to encourage an exchange of findings and approaches. The findings are in many ways complementary and each strand of literature would benefit from more interaction and consolidation of a shared understanding of what prevents citizens from demanding accountability. In summary, the workshop is organized around three, interrelated, broad questions on the citizen perspective on accountability in developing democracies: 1) How do citizens perceive, experience, and react to accountability problems in developing democracies? 2) What are the trade-offs in using formal and informal mechanisms to hold politicians accountable? 3) What is the role of individual (psychological, demographic), group, and supply-side factors in driving citizen’s actions toward accountability?